Steelworkers break the mold

Karen Rivedal, Tribune staff reporterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

After 42 years as a steelworker, Joe Gutierrez knew he had stories to tell. All he needed was someone to show him how.

Gutierrez, 60, learned to open the vault to the memories he had tucked away during a three-week writing workshop sponsored by the steelworkers' union at the Career Development Institute in Merrillville, Ind.

And it ended with a prize he never expected: His stories became part of a new book about daily life in and around the steel mills.

"The Heat: Steelworkers' Lives and Legends" is a 157-page collection of poems and short stories penned by 15 steelworkers from the Gary area and Baltimore. It is available through bookstores or by contacting the institute at 219-738-9029.

"For the first time, we open the door and let people look in," said Gary Markley, another of the nine Indiana steelworker-authors featured in the book.

Markley's offerings include a recounting of the insecurities that plague a longtime steelworker during the last hours of his last workday. The piece is fictional, but it was inspired by the people Markley has known during his 25 years as a third-generation mill worker at National Steel in Portage.

The Indiana mill workers attended the fall 1999 writing workshop, on their own time, under the tutelage of poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. Baca offered a separate workshop for Baltimore steelworkers in the fall of 2000.

"It's like watching a movie," Gutierrez said. "You write what you see in your head. You close your eyes and start typing."

Mill-related moments captured in the book include first-day jitters, family concerns, the experience of women workers in the mill, and the ever-present threat of injury or death from the mills' punishing heat and heavy equipment, which leave little room for error.

In "Missing at Work," one of Gutierrez's five pieces, the author gets inside the mind of a man who pours iron pellets from a wheelbarrow into a tall cauldron filled with molten steel.

As the man walks along a narrow plank, sweating and light-headed from the intense heat as he pushes the heavy wheelbarrow higher and higher toward the lip of the cauldron, he has flashbacks to a recurrent nightmare in which he slips and falls into the mold. But the man also recalls the constant exhortation of his father to work hard and well for his pay, Gutierrez writes, so he banishes the fear and continues to trudge--until he does slip, straight into the superheated open pit.

"The molten steel closed quietly over Jose Rubio, leaving only the stench of his burned flesh, which immediately mingled with the captured breath of this wretched building," Gutierrez wrote. "Jose Rubio became one with it all, and to look for a trace of him on the molten surface would have been futile."

Gutierrez, who started at Ispat Inland Steel when he was 18 and plans to work three more years before retiring, said he based that story on a man who died at the mill while performing a similar task. A permanent memorial has been erected in the mill in his honor.

In another of his pieces, a true story called "Snow Danced in August," Gutierrez describes with almost lyric beauty the sight of silvery dust flakes that frequently floated to the floor in an area of the mill where steel strips rolled over pads in a tall cooling tower. For years, workers and visitors alike flocked to the sight, which was especially picturesque at night, Gutierrez wrote.

Then they discovered the dust was asbestos.

"Everybody breathed it," wrote Gutierrez, who suffers from the slow, choking grip of asbestosis, as do many plant workers. "Who am I? I'm everybody. Can't walk too far now. I get tired real fast and it hurts when I breathe, sometimes. And to think we used to fight over that job."

Gutierrez said he doesn't shy away from death and dying in his stories because "that's life."

"I don't think it's a depressing book," he said. "I think it's a book that tells it like it is."